McLaren Racing has revealed a striking one-off livery for this weekend's British Grand Prix at Silverstone, and it is a departure from anything the team has run in recent memory. The MCL40 will carry a predominantly white design with a green central stripe, drawing directly from the McLaren M2B that debuted at the 1966 Monaco Grand Prix, the car that started it all.
The livery, created in partnership with Google Gemini under the campaign tagline Spark What's Next, is more than a cosmetic exercise. It ties together two moments in McLaren history that bookend six decades of competition. Bruce McLaren scored the team's first Formula 1 point at the 1966 British Grand Prix in the very same M2B. Now, as the team approaches its home race, that origin story is written across the car in clean white paint and a narrow green stripe.
The story behind the original M2B's colour scheme is itself worth retelling. McLaren's initial plan was a green-and-silver livery, but when Grand Prix director John Frankenheimer was filming his seminal F1 film in Monaco that same year, he needed a white car to represent the fictional Japanese team Yamura. McLaren agreed, and the white M2B became the car that launched a dynasty.
Lando Norris and Oscar Piastri will both wear white race suits for the weekend, while the MCL40 carries a Bruce McLaren Motor Racing Team sticker in honour of the founder. It is a subtle touch, but one that connects the current generation of drivers to the man whose name sits above the door.
Louise McEwen, McLaren's chief marketing officer, described the livery as a celebration of where the team began and everything it has built since. The partnership with Google Gemini extends beyond aesthetics: McLaren's trackside engineers are using Gemini Enterprise to search and compare dense sporting regulations during a race, and a natural-language interface pulls data from multiple systems to accelerate lap-time analysis.
Fans will be able to see the livery up close at the Gemini Paddock, a free public activation at the Truman Brewery in East London running from Thursday through the British Grand Prix weekend. The livery also builds on McLaren's 1,000th Grand Prix celebrations earlier this season in Monaco, where Mika Hakkinen drove the original M2B around the Circuit de Monaco in tribute.
The 2026 British Grand Prix takes place across the weekend of 3-5 July, with the Sprint on Saturday and the main race on Sunday at 3pm BST.
